URL:

http://www.invent.org/book.book-text/57.html

Topic:

Herman Hollerith

Year:

Herman Hollerith was born on February 29, 1860 and died on November 17, 1929.

Summary Composer:

Christine Falvo Click here for searching strategies.

100 Word Summary:

Herman Hollerith was the American inventor of a punch-card tabulating machine system that revolutionized the tabulating process of the United States Census Bureau in 1880. The device sensed the holes in the punched cards and would trigger a wire to pass into a pool of mercury under the card (closing the electrical circuit). The idea that arose from watching a train conductor punch tickets cut the length of time to tally the population by two years and saved the bureau $5 million. It allowed for the accuracy of processing to increase dramatically and for unlimited memory to be stored. Hollerith is credited with initiating the growth of the computer industry and is the founder of a company now called ibm.

Bibliography:

Burgess, B. (1995, October 22). Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) [WWW document]. URL http://www.kzoo.edu/~abrady/CS400/bioW96/burgess.html

Hoyle, M. (1995). Hollerith & Tabulating Machine [WWW document]. URL http://calypso.cs.uregina.ca/Lecture/hollerith.html

NetForce Development, Inc. (1996). Herman Hollerith [WWW document]. URL http://www.invent.org/book/book-text/57.html

O'Connor, J., and Robertson, E. (1996, February). Herman Hollerith [WWW document]. URL http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/ Hollerith.html

The standard citation used was taken from the APA proposed format: http://www.beadsland.com/weapas/